A nonprofit I work with has a Discourse installation 2.9.0.beta1, for which maintenance fell to me when the original admin moved on. When I tried to update the SMTP credentials, I learned that the installation can neither rebuild itself nor safely upgrade, via web or via commandline. (If I hadn’t had a hot backup of the instance made before work began, this would’ve been a bad time.) The problem appears to happen fairly deep in Ruby, and I can capture logs if they’d seem helpful.
I thought it might just be too old to gracefully update, so I tried a recovery process instead, creating a new fresh Discourse instance and then loading the most recent backup of the forum into it, but this process also failed inconclusively, with what I think were database column errors before the upgrade process went nonresponsive.
What would be the best way to proceed from where we’re standing? The forum is currently functional this minute, I can just neither upgrade nor, apparently, employ a backup. Should I continue to try for recovery, should I redouble my efforts to upgrade and go capture logs to get started, or is there a third option I don’t see?